Roy Baumeister is one of the most respected social psychological researchers alive today, so when I saw that he had given a talk with the title of this post, I had to read it. It has given me much to think about, and of course I’m going to share.

Baumeister starts by noting the obvious: there is a strong thread of man-bashing in the world (especially in academia). But the talk isn’t just a balance-the-scales exercise; it’s a thoughtful look at why various gender differences might be the way they are, from an evolutionary perspective, and whether the things that make men men might not play an important part in the success of cultures (the answer is yes, if you want to skip the rest of this post).

Dr. B suggests that culture is a higher-level strategy developed for improving our odds of surviving. Thus, whatever works for a culture must also help its members reproduce… at least on average (it’s evolution, yo). The history of gender then shifts from men versus women to men and women in groups versus other groups, and against the harsh realities of the physical world. Many gender differences — biological, social, cultural, psychological — can be seen as adaptations resulting from this struggle.

So, how does culture use (exploit) men to perpetuate itself? Baumeister’s answers are embedded in a “radical theory of gender equality. Men and women may be different, but each advantage may be linked to a disadvantage.” This leads to some very thought-provoking evidence and implications, many of which I’m about to summarize (warning: lots of content after the cut): Continue reading →

or something not exactly like that. Research in this month’s issue of Science that finds a significant correlation (among people with strongly-held political views) between certain physical reactions and political leanings. The physical reactions studied had to do with how intensely people responded to being scared by shocking images (photo of a spider on a face, gaping wound filled with maggots, sudden noises etc.).

The strongest responses to the shocking stimuli were witnessed in people who favored “socially protective policies,” which…

…tend to be held by people “particularly concerned with protecting the interests of the participants’ group, defined as the United States in mid-2007, from threats.” These positions include support for military spending, warrantless searches, the death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and Biblical truth, and opposition to pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.

The paper concluded, “Political attitudes vary with physiological traits linked to divergent manners of experiencing and processing environmental threats.” This may help to explain “both the lack of malleability in the beliefs of individuals with strong political convictions and the associated ubiquity of political conflict.”¹

1. From the Science Daily summary (because I certainly can’t afford a subscription to Science), [↩]

I feel intensely frustrated, watching election coverage. I have located one source of that frustration (there are many): the fact that we pretend elections are about the issues that are being discussed by the overly-cosmeticized talking heads on TV.

So what that there are multiple videos showing Sarah Palin actually supporting the maligned “bridge to nowhere” project, despite repeatedly claiming she has always been a staunch opponent. So what that there is similar evidence showing her boasting about the considerable river of pork she kept flowing into Alaska while Governor. And who cares about her using her government position to enforce personal grudges. Or the multilayered hypocrisy of using her own motherood to further her campaign, supporting intrusive big-government oversight of everyone else’s motherhood, referencing her evangelical Christian beliefs and standards as evidence of her electability, and then insisting that her daughter’s un-evangelically Christian pregnancy is off-limits for reporters. And speaking of reporters… she’ll only do interviews if she’s guaranteed to be treated with deference. Does that count for debates, too? If Biden says something non-deferential, does she take her ball and go home?

Then there’s McCain. It’s almost a sin for mainstream media to question the finer details of his military record (many parts are inspiring, but some iz not so graet ackshully). It also seems a little unpopular, on the big news shows, to ask the very legitimate question of whether McCain’s record (especially the POW treatment he mentions pretty much every time he gets in front of a microphone) is actually relevant to his qualifications to be President. And then there’s Mr. Straight Talk Express’s refusal to answer questions he doesn’t like, and his penchant for using the police to remove troublesome folks who disagree with him (or who are suspected of planning to disagree with him, or who are suspected of photographing or otherwise documenting said police-powered removal) from his “town hall” meetings and… um… national conventions. I guess this is the freedom Senator McCain was fighting for, all those years ago.

I could go on and on, but I’ll skip straight to his latest ad, claiming that Obama supports sex ed for preschoolers or something. Of course it’s either a serious misrepresentation or a flat-out lie, but so what?

Now, I realize that was pretty one-sided. I didn’t say any of the bad stuff that is probably true about Senator Obama, or the even-more-bad-stuff that is almost certainly true about Senator Biden. But I don’t know much of that stuff, since I crossed over to the dark side have become more liberal in many of my political leanings. I know a few things, of course: Obama isn’t as 100% anti-earmarks as he has claimed. His political experience (though not as pathetic as Palin’s) is not as great as some other candidates’. He has played hardball politics behind the scenes while playing Mr. Nice Guy in front of the cameras. And Biden? Well, he’s offended people on both side of the political divide (which kind of makes me wanna like him…).

In a sense, none of this matters. Why? Because the issues are, I submit, not the primary reason most people vote the way they do.  I don’t have research to back this up, but I’d lay good money on it: People vote mostly because of identity. The issues matter to some people a lot, and to most people a little, but the big factor is identity¹. We vote because voting is both a demonstration and a reminder of who we are.

The commonsense model of how people decide whom to vote for might be like this:1. Investigate issues
2. Investigate parties/candidates
3. Vote for best match

Or something like that. And that’s how it should work. The world would be a better place, if it did. But it’s backward, if you’re looking at how things actually work. Here is how I think people really vote:

1. Self-identity.  You know, a knowledge of who we are. This knowledge is often implicit (not conscious), and it’s not as firm as we’d like, most of the time. It also involves, perhaps paradoxically, a heavy dose of ongoing awareness of who our social group is, and what their attitudes and opinions are. Most of us work very hard, daily, to maintain the support and approval of our social group (whether near or far away, physical or virtual), and as a result we absorb their attitudes and opinions. This includes both the positions we take on many issues, as well as our ideas about which issues are important, and how to even frame discussions about the issues.

2. Identity confirmation. Ay, here’s the rub. We’re much more concerned with reassuring ourselves of the validity of our cherished ideas of who we are, than we are about the so-called issues. So, we look for candidates who validate our sense of who we are. If we are Republicans, we look for Republicans. If Democrats, we look for a Democrat. If we see ourselves as fiscal conservatives, we find a candidate who makes us feel like a fiscal conservative. If we think we are environmentalists, then we’re gonna vote Green.

Everything after step 2 is a bit of a shameful (but fascinating) mess. Remember; it’s entirely possible to become doggedly supportive of a candidate with no knowledge of issues, whatsoever. So, we engage in a process of selectively ignoring information that makes our already-chosen candidate seem less than ideal (because we identify with that candidate), and paying attention to information that boosts our favorite. What’s more, we filter not only our information, but our sources of information. We stop hanging around with, or conversing with, people who don’t think our candidate (or party or philosophy) is the cat’s pajamas, spending our time, instead, with people who agree with us. This naturally restricts the kinds of information we have access to. We are careful about where we get our news. Liberals generally don’t watch Fox, and conservatives tend to get fed up with MSNBC (and they certainly would never watch Democracy Now).

See why the issues are irrelevant? Even if you could strap conservative voters into dentists’ chairs, tape their eyeballs open, and show them the video evidence of Sarah Palin contradicting her stump speech claims, the opinions probably would not change. Because it’s not about whether she is telling the truth or not, and it’s not about whether she’d be a good Veep (or, heaven forbid, President) or not. It’s about how her supporters feel about themselves when they think about supporting her, and evidence of misrepresentation is unlikely to change that.

The same goes for all the candidates. It takes very little imagination to picture these same mental/emotional processes happening with the die-hard Hillary supporters who would rather see a Republican in office than Barack Obama, or Obama’s own starry-eyed consumers of his message of (perhaps just a teensy bit unrealistic) Hope and Change, or John McCain’s minions, who seem to imagine a new Golden Age of American Prosperity, if only we can get a tough military guy who claims to be a maverick into office. And Ron Paul? No imagination at all is required to envision the rabid, information-independent support from his camp.

Disagree? Fine. Tell me about it. But make sure your alternate theory accounts for this phenomenon, at least: voting patterns and party affiliations “clump together” geographically and organizationally (i.e., within professions), somewhat independent of social class, ethnicity, and other obvious demographics. If people “voted the issues,” this should not happen.

So, even if we elect the person I think gives us the best chance of not flushing ourselves completely down the toilet in the next 4 to 8 years, I firmly believe I have somewhat accurately outlined the individual voting process.

And that’s why we’re screwed.

1. The psychologically astute reader will note that I ripped this off from Tajfel & Turner, and that this whole rant is an application of Social Identity Theory [↩]

Grackle trapped in Houston Hobby, far out of my reach

Recent report of a woman who remembers everything¹. Every detail of her life for every day, every hour, every minute. Sound like a useful trick? It’s also extremely unpleasant, apparently:

“But I also recall every bad decision, insult and excruciating embarrassment. Over the years it has eaten me up. It has kind of paralysed me.”

“Most have called it a gift. But I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!”

A few individuals with similar conditions have been studied through the decades (e.g., the Soviet neuroscientist Aleksandr Luria’s patient “S“, detailed in The Mind of a Mnemonist), and they generally find ways to use their memory powers for some kind of benefit. But they also tend to report unpleasant side effects, one of which is an inability to “filter” memories. This is Not a Good Thing.

Our long-term memory systems are massively self-organizing, and reducing the probability of recall for certain items is a key part of the organizational strategy. In other words, forgetting is very important. Also, apparently, it makes you happier.

Perhaps I’ll get started on some forgetting, right now. There are some past incidents I would dearly love to become less aware of.

1. Well, since she was 14, anyway [↩]

I took that insane test today. The EPPP. Was I ready? No. I should have been studying all year, but instead I was doing other things. I made a big push over the past six weeks or so, but half of that was interrupted by unforseen Very Bad Things that required all my time, and the other half was marked by my standard not-really-dedicated approach to things.

You are allocated 4 1/2 hours for the test, and I took all but about 15-2o min. of that. I went nice and slow, reading carefully, marking and revisiting confusing items, etc. The good news is that the test questions themselves aren’t (in general) nearly as poorly written as some of those in the Academic Review study materials I’ve been using. The bad news is that this probably didn’t matter. When you don’t got it… you don’t got it. I’m mentally preparing myself for the “you did not pass” letter. Which will arrive in “several weeks.” Most inconvenient.

I was a little too clever for my own good. I tried to keep track of how I was doing by putting little dots on the whiteboard-thing I was given for notes. I put a dot under a smiley face for every item I was almost certain I had answered correctly, a dot under a worried face for each item I figured I had about a 50/50 chance on (this is multiple choice) and a dot under a sad face for those I knew absolutely nothing about. The results:

:-) 113
:-S  70
:-(  38

I know that’s not 225, so I must have counted wrong, but it’s close enough for an estimate. I multiplied the “sure” total by .9, to account for being sure and also wrong (this happens with disconcerting frequency in my life); the “maybe” total by .5 (because I assumed that, overall, I might get half of those right), and the “no freaking clue” total by .25 (because I was just guessing on those).

The result: My estimated score is 147. That sounds OK, until you realize that 158 is the cutoff.  So, I’m pretty sure I FAILD. It’s always possible (though, by definition, unlikely) that my crazy guessing was more successful than I realize, but that’s not a realistic hope.

Oh well. I can do this again in the Fall, I guess.

What it is with the completely irrelevant crap on the EPPP (the national licensure exam for psychology)? It makes no sense to me that (a) aspiring clinical psychologists have to know the details of Industrial-Organizational psychology, or (b) we should be required to have an intimate understanding of all the archaic psychotherapeutic missteps and quackery we know do NOT work and that nobody even practices anymore cough*FREUD*cough.
I figure, if AATBS (the folks who make the exam) were in charge of medical licensing, your family M.D. would have to answer questions like these before he or she would be allowed to see patients:

1. Which of the following is the most accurate representation of leech theory, as prominently endorsed in the 19th century?
a. Leechiotides are responsible for cleansing the patient’s ill humours
b. A goodly leech may purge a stout man’s augured spirits
c. The leech, if applied delicately, will remove all disease-prone impurities from the blood
d. Accurate leech placement is a feather in the cap of any competent physician

2. Galen’s humorific disease model would explain pancreatic cancer as:
a. A stygian compromise between black and yellow bile
b. A confluence of the miniature demons of the gastrointestinal tract, in the context of phlegm and bad blood
c. Unbalanced bilious secretions being overly cooled by the brain
d. The heart fire losing its steam before untimely extraction

3. Under the neoclassical Greek model of women’s medicine prevalent in the early 1900s, which of the following is sufficient reason for removing a woman’s uterus and ovaries, thus imparting better-than-even odds of condemning her to death by sepsis in the weeks of forced convalescence in a filth-ridden and psychopathology-inducing “hospital” following a horrifically nonsterile operation?
a. The wandering uterus is a threat to masculinity everywhere and must be stopped at all costs
b. Melancholy, unfeminine delusions of political equality, or a measurable sex drive are fates worse than death anyway
c. Ours is not to question why; ours is but to do what the only financially solvent member of the household — the husband — tells us to
d. She is a woman; no justification is required

4. Proper chiropractic alignment of the lumbar vertebrae and the sixth chakra will result in which of the following:
a. Improved posture, removal of bodily toxins, mental awakening and self-actualization
b. Improved posture, gait-balance correction, self-actualization and enlightenment
c. Self-actualization, aural cleansing, recovery from autoimmune diseases and viral resistance
d. None of the above; there are only five chakras

5. The ethical code for licensed massage therapists requires biannual:
a. Update of patient personal information and muscle tension profiles
b. Plea-bargain pre-agreements in the case of national or state-level congressional clients
c. Bloodborne pathogen screening and criminal background check
d. Cross-referencing of sex-offender registries with client lists

6. As a medical anthropologist, you are asked to evaluate the physical and mental health of a group of Quiche Maya in the highlands of Guatemala. Your first step should be:
a. Approach the village council and ask for your horoscope according to the Tzolkin
b. Build relationships with the women’s circles
c. Prescribe antibiotics and antiviral agents
d. Declare your allegiance to the traditional healing methods of the shaman

7. Consulting as a marine biologist for West coast fisheries, you encounter evidence of illegal commercial fishing in the salmon migration waters. The best course of action for maximum preservation of the endangered population is:
a. Geotagging a random sample of salmon
b. Relocation of at least 1,000 salmon breeding pairs to freshwater hatcheries
c. Political activism in the context of the Endangered Species Act
d. What the hell do inane questions like this have to do with becoming licensed as a medical doctor

…not that my actual freshman roomie was like this. Sometimes psychological diagnosis is difficult and counterintuitive. Sometimes the categories don’t form “natural kinds” to the untrained eye. However, sometimes they absolutely do. I was struck just now, studying for the EPPP, of how very, very familiar the following diagnostic category is. I think everyone has known at least a couple of people like this in their life:

At least 5 of the following criteria present, in a stable pattern, starting at least in adolescence, and continuing throughout most of life:

• feels uncomfortable when not the center of attention
• often inappropriately sexually seductive or provocative
• emotions are shallow and shift rapidly
• uses speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacks detail
• displays exaggerated emotional expression
• is easily influenced by others
• considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are

Or maybe I have just had some weird (girl)friends.

Question for the day: is psychology a science? Yes¹. But I think people are made very uncomfortable by psychology, so they’d rather believe otherwise. I will explain.

This recurring line of thought was reawakened during a recent argument conversation with some friends, when one of them implied that the results of psychological research could not be applied to the subject at hand, despite the fact that the research I was referring to was addressed directly toward this same subject. The implication of the comment seemed to be that the results were not applicable because they were based on psychological research. We were not actually talking about the viability of psychology as a science, so what I say from here on out isn’t directed to the people I was having this dustup cool, collected exchange of ideas with. See, this has come up many times in other conversations with other people, so this instance was a trigger to remind me of the whole ball of wax.

It’s never fun to have one’s chosen profession dismissed outright, but I believe one must always be ready to admit, if necessary, that one’s activities may have been based on misguided assumptions. As a psychology guy, I’ve thought long and hard about the validity and viability of psychological science. The results of this thinking follow. Feel free to disagree or tell me I’m a total genius.

First question: Is psychology a science? Yes. I laugh heartily at anyone who says it’s not². Science is a method, not a field of study or a set of results. I could study the multicolored spirit auras over psychic tarot readers’ heads, and if I did it with the scientific method, color-aura-ology would be a science (even if it produced no useful results, but that’s a separate issue entirely). I am acutely aware that many psychologists — especially non-researchers– either avoid or willfully ignore the scientific method, but this is a problem endemic to all scientific fields. There are always some wackos, nut jobs, idiots and charlatans³. Many of them have PhDs. Continue reading →

1. As much as anything else is [↩]
2. Ha ha ha! [↩]
3. Notably, there is research suggesting that there are more of these in psychology than in the general public; see Maeder T: Wounded healers. Atlantic Monthly, Jan 1989 [↩]